I am making a home slowly. That sentence has been the entire shape of September.
The new place is small and high-windowed and gets the kind of late-afternoon light that does not ask permission. I have been living with mostly empty rooms for weeks now, partly because furniture has to be chosen rather than acquired, and partly because the walls themselves have been doing some teaching. A blank wall in a new house tells you something about who you are right now and who you have been pretending to be. I have listened more than I have decorated.
I owe a serious thank-you to the landladies. I want to put that in the entry on purpose, because the kind of grace I have been shown by them is the kind I keep trying, and so far failing, to repay in any way commensurate with what it has actually been. They are grounded in a way that takes you a few minutes to notice and the rest of your life to properly admire. They are honest without being sharp about it. They are hospitable in the old, real sense of the word — not just opening a door, but making the place behind the door feel open, which is a different and far harder skill. And they are joyful. Genuinely, daily, in the small ways that hold a household up.
I have been received here in a way that does not happen often in adulthood, and certainly not in a year like the one I have been having. They have given me far more than they will ever know, which is to say more than I have figured out how to articulate without sounding either underwhelming or ridiculous. I will keep trying. One day I hope to thank them in a way that feels equal to who they are. Until then, this paragraph stands as a placeholder, and an entirely sincere one.
Shards of Serenity
In tangled thoughts, the cosmos wide, I toiled for peace, for light inside. Through trials and battles, fierce and fought, Mending solace, in fragments caught.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →The slow part of "making a home slowly" is, I have realized, the actual point. Furniture I rush into a room is furniture I will resent within a month. Walls I cover too quickly become walls I no longer see. The empty room is a teacher — a slightly impatient one, but a teacher. I am letting it speak.
I have been writing more in the new space than I expected to. Less from the desk, more from the floor, more from the kitchen counter, more from the chair I dragged into the corner because the light was right at four o'clock. Different angles in a new house produce different sentences. That has been the small thrilling discovery of the month.
The home is not done. It will not be done. That is the bargain. A home that thinks it is done has stopped paying attention to the people inside it. I would like mine to stay a little unfinished — slightly under-furnished, slightly under-decided, willing to keep changing as I do. The landladies, I notice, run their lives that way too. I do not think it is an accident that the household feels alive.
I came in slowly. I am staying slowly. Both, it turns out, are forms of devotion.